Vietnam War Nurses Struggled on Two Fronts

Army nurses faced bloodshed overseas and miniskirts at home.

By TCU Magazine

November 15^th, 2021

By Sheryl Jean

The memoir of a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam sparked TCU history professor Kara Dixon Vuic’s career path, leading her to study the role of women in war for 20 years.

“I was just blown away by [the author’s] description of the actual work of nursing, the emotional cost,” Vuic said, “and her discussion of being empowered by the military but also being expected to be the cute little girl.”

Vuic explored similar themes in her 2010 book, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press), and other writing.

Most of the roughly 11,000 military women stationed in Vietnam during the war were nurses, although women also held positions such as dietitians, air traffic controllers, intelligence officers and clerks.

At home, women were involved in the anti-war and second-wave feminism movements. Feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem visited TCU in spring 1971 and talked about women’s rights. That same year, the U.S. House approved the reintroduced Equal Rights Amendment. (Senate approval came in 1972, but the amendment was never ratified.)

After being given great responsibility in Vietnam, many women found “equality in the military that they didn’t find in the civilian world,” Vuic said. But some didn’t view themselves as feminists, she added.

“Many nurses opposed the Vietnam War and were conflicted about being in the military,” Vuic said. “They saw the world differently … and felt disconnected from their generation.”

After serving in Vietnam for 12 months, for example, female nurses came home and saw what had happened to the length of skirts, she said. They were interested in new fashions after wearing camouflage all day, “but they also thought it was totally meaningless because all these people were dying in Vietnam.”

Most of the nurses interviewed by Vuic joined the military as a way to pay for their education. Women then couldn’t join ROTC, a military training program at universities; today, TCU’s Army ROTC program ranks No. 1 in producing nurses in its seven-state brigade.

By 1971, the military began to see women in a different light. By 1973, when the draft ended, military leaders acknowledged that all-volunteer armed forces must include more women.

Since then, the number and role of women in the military have expanded. Today, they make up more than 16 percent of the 1.3 million active-duty forces, up from less than 2 percent in the early 1970s.

Many of the 11,000 women who served in Vietnam found “equality in the military that they didn’t find in the civilian world,” says Kara Dixon Vuic. Photo by Rodger Mallison

“It was the end of the draft during the last days of the Vietnam War that spurred significant changes for women in the military,” said Vuic, who is working on her third book, which will be about the history of 20th- and 21st-century debates on drafting women for military service. For her research on that book, she recently received a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a $7,500 Cokie Roberts Fellowship for Women’s History from the National Archives Foundation.

After women gained the right in 2013 to participate in military combat, the question arose as to whether they should register with the Selective Service System, which resumed in 1980 for men ages 18 to 25. The National Coalition for Men sued in 2013, charging that requiring only men to register constitutes sex discrimination and is unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court in June declined to hear the case, kicking it back to Congress to decide whether to change the requirement that only men must register for the draft. A statement by three of the justices cited the court’s “long-standing deference to Congress on matters of national defense and military affairs.”

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